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We just rolled out a new replies notification feature. You’ll notice that there is a small envelope icon next to your name at the top of the page.

Every 30 minutes, we check to see if new comments have been added to your posts, or if new answers have been added to your questions. If so, the envelope will light up. Mousing over the envelope will explain what’s going on.

Clicking on the envelope in either state will take you to your recent activity page. This page is private to you.

The focus of the recent activity page is things other Stack Overflow users have done to your stuff! In other words, if users have…

We also have a handy topbar notification if you’ve been away from Stack Overflow for at least 24 hours. It links to the exact same page, but will tell you exactly how many new answers and comments your posts have generated while you were gone.

We’re still refining how the recent activity page works, but hopefully this will make it easier for you to find (and possibly respond) to the answers and comments left on your posts!

Let’s say I comment on someone else’s question or answer, possible asking for additional information. They’ll see that in their responses and most likely eventually reply. But I’ll never get any notification about when they replied. If I don’t go back and keep checking the conversation died there, and the question likely remained unanswered.

Juan: I have the same problem with clicking the envelope crashing IE7, for me under WinXP 32-bit. The ‘More Information’ link on the crash dialog redirects to a page stating “This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. There is no solution for this problem at this time.” :-(

The one time I did see the page when it first went live, the layout looked a pretty screwy with text cut off in several places. In face I’m noticing this with a few SO pages now under IE7. If this isn’t happening already, can the SO team please check that the new features work under all of the common browsers before putting them live? Thanks.

Did you change how interesting/ignored tags are being highlighted? It now appears that if a question is tagged with a word that contains as a substring a tag that I want to ignore or that I find interesting, the question is highlighted.

For example, if I have “java” flagged as interesting, any question tagged “javascript” is now also showing up highlighted yellow (orange?). This isn’t too big a deal until you take into account that someone might have “c” flagged as either interesting (as I do) or to ignore. Almost every question now shows up highlighted for me.

To be positive, I’ll start of with what I like.
* I like the ability to filter on time ranges.
* I like the summary of activity at the top

I dislike:
* The 14 day limit on the range. How much of a performance hit is 6 months or a year of activity (for everyone but Jon Skeet)
* The the one day default for the range; give me a couple of days of history at least – I haven’t done anything yet today to report on.
* The size of the times on the left (even in that soft grey it is a little in your face).

Is this why stackoverflow pegs the cpu on my browser when looking at a question? This is on an old mozilla, but it still does it to a lesser degree on a recent firefox. The page appears static, but the browser is definitely working on something…

I’d also argue that this ought page ought to contain *everything* I want to see about myself: both the existing stuff and everything that’s currently on the user profile page.

In particular I don’t like having to switch between the two to see what I’ve recently done (answers and comments I’ve recently posted). It’s a UI inconsistency. Basically I think there ought to be a single user profile UI, where some tabs are removed when you’re looking at a different user.

Having said that, this is the first version of this UI and it’s already incredibly useful, so good job :)

> I’d also argue that this ought page ought to contain *everything* I want to see about myself

More along those lines, it seems as though most of the newer features we’re seeing are more focused on showing us what’s happened *recently*. What about the posts I made in the past? There are times when I want to find that one post I made that one time whose name I can’t remember.

Before, I’d wade through all the answers on my profile, but now I can’t do that as that’s limited to 100 posts. Some kind of archive type feature that lets me go back through older posts would be nice.

@Jason M – agreed. I have old answers on the site which I’ve now started to refer to in new answers that are now hard to get at because of some of the decisions taken recently. I can use the rep history page with the graph and set a large date range, but the presentation is somewhat wanting with having all your posts crammed into that tiny scrolling div/panel. Also who knows when that gets clobbered by a 14 or 30 max day range limit?

Jeff….why do you make this so hard? Why can’t you just give us a paged list of all our past posts (and comments maybe), say 20 per page? The usability score of SO in this respect has taken a bit of a dip. Yes all the fancy MVC/Ajaxy UI toys are very nice and cool, but you’re making it harder for us to perform certain tasks such as mine my/other users old content in a systematic way.

Am I the only one who thinks this is the most confusing looking page ever? I mean, big fonts are cool, but using big fonts to display numbers in a million formats that make no sense to me? It’s like getting slapped after first being kicked hard in the groin.

Seriously, did we do any reality checks on this page? I do not understand it. I was really looking forward to this feature but all I can do now is shake my head.

My guess is That Jeff and co must really really really hate RSS feeds. I can think of no other reason to waste time producing such a page, whilst continuing to refuse to provide simple RSS solutions to keeping track of comments and answers.

Of course it does occur to me that the problem in delivering RSS feeds to SO users might be because of the decision to use open id, rather than allowing local accounts, making authentication difficult.

@David Arno: RSS feeds may well work for responses and badges, but I don’t think they’d work for reputation. Personally I really like the information on the new set of pages. I would perhaps like it organised slightly differently, and certainly integrated with the main user profile page, but I definitely like having it there rather than as an RSS feed.

Often it comes to the point where one discussion spans two separate answers, because you and the other guy keep copying replies to each others answer to get each others attention. This is unnecessarily wasteful and confusing for third parties. A twitter style reply function could solve this.

I also get ‘false positives’ all the time. And when something does happen e.g. my rep goes up (I see the number has changed) the envelope can be slow to catch up (it still shows “no replies”).

I too like Joel Coehoorn’s idea. It might be also nice to be able to track new activity in any of my favourite questions (where I may not have participated myself), all on the same page. But like others said, thanks for the first version which is already very useful!